Heaven Knows, We Belong Way Down Below
by Mooky-aron
Summary: Sakura is a civilian, from civilian parents with civilian friends— she's normal down to her bones, isn't she? Except they're all dead and her house is coated with dust that echoes with the rumble of the nameless dead— and a girl with a demon for a soul can never be normal.


Sakura may be a twelve year old girl, but she is made of steel, with barbed wire wrapped around her bones— bones that are civilian down to the core. Something vicious curls, languorously, around her heart like an overgrown house—cat, morphed into a creature wild and savage. It growls in the night, twisting and stretching into something dark beneath her skin. One day, she may forget where she ends and the demon begins— but not now.

She's weak, terrifyingly so— which makes her all the more dangerous. She has nothing left to lose, and her childhood home has been barren for years, coated in a layer of dust and ash that rumbles with the voices of the nameless dead. Sakura is only human, humblingly so, and has never had the power to be able afford convictions nor the strength to uphold morals— morals are the entitlement of the strong and the powerhouses and those who can afford to turn away from the darkness their duty is constructed of. (decay and rot and blood and bone keep these trees strong)

Her team rushes forward, blazing with power and talent— it seeps from their skin and echoes in their voices, that strength they take for granted, as if everyone can afford to be upstanding. Sasuke is one of the tragic orphans, the ones that poets like to romanticise and the kind that makes him important to the village— he's the last loyal Uchiha and they can't afford to lose him— so he reaps the benefits of the elite. What does it matter that Sakura lost everything she had left on the same night— who cared about a triple homicide when a clan massacre had taken place the same night? Certainly not the Konoha police force— who lay with their stomachs open to the air and empty eye sockets fixed on the sky with horror, and no one had come to the crying of a child who held her baby brother close to her chest, blood soaked and wide eyed.

(But nobody came.)

Naruto, for all his pretense and bluster, is somehow important to the village— and it shows, in the careful gazes of a double ANBU team that she sometimes spots as her team moves around the village. It isn't because he's an orphan— Sakura knows far too much about the fate of clanless orphans in this village to be fooled by that excuse. No, somehow he is important and the sheer power that glows from him, even when he expends no chakra, is terrifying— she'd eat her own front door if that wasn't the reason for the double roster that follows him. His parents were dead, from the Kyuubi attack and they must've been important enough for the Hokage to want to befriend their child so eagerly.

(why do they guard him and not her, her and the baby and mama and papa and oh god they aren't waking up) 

Nobody cares about the deaths of Haruno family, or that a 7 year old girl is left trying to support herself and bury her family, with only the meagre coin that her parents had saved, and Sakura weeps when the note in the savings jar says the meagre collection is for her dowry.

She buries her family beneath a flowering cherry blossom with the money of her dowry, and ignores her inner thoughts, a creature that growls, snaps and burns beneath her skin like a rabid dog. She spends the last of her coin to afford the headstones and, like clockwork, she cleans them every morning, rain or sun. She distracts herself from the mongrel in her mind, repeating in white—rage the words of a curse she'd heard her father use once, when the village refused to allow them to sell produce over the clan's marketable wares, for all that the village knew Haruno wares were superior. It was politics, and her father had said as much between curses.

May the Uchiha scorch your bones and the Inuzuka piss on the remains. Let the carrion birds pluck at your eyes and the wolves tear at your limbs. May you find no peace, may you wander the realms for all eternity and may the cursed dead feed on your bones…

She doesn't know who she curses anymore— maybe it's everything, maybe it's everyone. The village who condemned her, with their morals, to this life where they can ignore her dead family and a baby who never found justice, torn apart by a man who she sometimes sees laughing in the street, hands dangling over his comrades' shoulders and blood drips through her clenched hands when she must walk past him. In retrospect, it's him she curses. With his hands free of dried blood and his smile wide with his children, she curses him every spare moment she has.

The curse seems to linger every morning, soaking like blood into the dark soil and the rough stone, into the cherry blossom that blooms darker each year it seems. It's fitting, if eery. Behind the cemetery burbles the Naka river, such a fitting sight for the graves of her family.

She wonders if Sasuke sees the faces of the dead in this river, the same as she does. The thought springs unbidden and she shakes it off, as a wolf rids it's coat of water or one flicks a katana to rid it of blood. The second analogy sends a white hot line down her back, so she turns back to the graves in thought.

"Good morning, tou0-san. I graduated yesterday, top of the class like you always said I would. I finally managed to find an apartment. Madame Tsuna's is closing down and merging with the parlour across the street. I'm not old enough to be one of her working girls, so I've been working as a runner. I don't think you would like what I've been doing. But you always told me to survive, so I've been trying my best. I love you, tou-san."

Her mother's grave is clean and moss—free at this time of year, the summer heat making her work on the graves ever so slightly easier. Her hands still tremble as she wipes the dust and dirt from them, but the lack of moss is a welcome sight. She won't need to scrub them down for a few weeks, though she'll end up doing it several times for a lack of other maintenance.

"Morning, kaa-chan. Ino and I haven't stopped fighting but I don't want to let go of it. It's how we've been communicating and acting for so long— it feels like a habit now." Her voice wavers, scratchy with unshed tears. Talking to her mother is always hard. "I'm finally going to be a ninja— I know you didn't want me to be but it's all I have now, since that man took you all away. And I finally learned how to make that egg dish you loved— it's too late for you to taste it but I hope you enjoy it wherever you are. I miss you, kaa-chan. Konoha is scary, without you."

She moves onto the smallest of the graves, and no amount of self—restraint can hold back these tears. Toushou had been only three, with a gap tooth smile and unrestrained laughter that became increasingly infectious the more one heard it, with a heart so big she'd wanted to keep him the duties of a shinobi. They would've taken him anyway. "Hey Shou-chan, guess what?! Your nee-chan is a genin now, with the hitaite and everything. I'm gonna tie it around my left shoulder, just like you did when we played ninja in the backyard!" The tears are falling freely now, so many tears even after all these years, and Sakura does nothing to stop them. "Shou-chan, did you know that the man next door planted a bamboo plant for you? He prays for you every day— sometimes I catch him slipping tomatoes into my mailbox. He used to be so mean and cranky— I think he remembers you and kaa-chan when he sees me. I hope he remembers the happy moments, because I forget to do that these days."

She often wonders if this is something all ninja go through. This age of silence and dust and no reply to her call into the apartment, a faltering sound that grows ever more hopeless every day. Sometimes, she does not call out and instead enters quietly, the familiar pattern of home falling apart with the absence of a familiar cast. In the carved out hollow of her heart, where this demon has made its home, it stretches languidly and catlike as it awakens. Twisted teeth flash in her mind, the sunflash of an apparition in the corner of her eye— and she misses Inner Sakura more, rather than this vicious thing her mind has become. It's voice fills her mind, sly and oddly saccharine-sweet. She hates it's voice, a constant murmur in her mind.

There is no one to greet you, child. Let those ghosts go.

It drives her to remember them more. She thinks, one day, that those ghosts will forgive her. Inside, the demon twists and chuckles. It's an unpleasant sound, all warped and deliriously amused by her hope— she hates the sound but she knows the shadow of death that nestles against her chest is far wiser than she is. It smiles without kindness, laughs without joy— but there is no creature she trusts more.

So she bows over these chunks of polished stone, where the bones of her blood and flesh and childhood lie moldering from neglect, until her forehead touches damp earth and she prays forgiveness, hopes that the gravekeeper will care for these stones. She aches— she knows he will not but she cannot turn back.

She won't be back, not until a man lies dying in front of his family and she finally smile into his eyes., watch the light leave them like she watched Shou's light fade on a winter's night. She hopes her family can forgive her, when she returns a monster.

She doesn't think they would.

She doesn't think they could.


End file.
